So much for preserving the secret, I thought.
“It seems she never surfaced—that’s right, never showed up—so these good folks need to fly to where Hal dropped her off at that cabin in Walker Cove—that’s right, they want to go this afternoon—I just thought you might have some time and—what’s that, Bobby?—I’m sure they’re willing to pay what you ask.”
She glanced at us, and we all nodded like bobble-heads on an automobile’s dashboard.
“That’s right, Bobby—they said they’d met you earlier today—what?—you will?—that’s wonderful—I’ll send them right over.”
“Trust me,” she said after rejoining us at the table, “Bobby Borosky is a fine pilot. The reason he and Hal don’t fly for the big floatplane operators is that they prefer to pick and choose their passengers. You don’t get to do that with the big boys.”
“Had your husband alerted the authorities about his passenger and her destination?” I asked. “You said she didn’t seem like the sort of woman who would enjoy roughing it.”
“He intended to,” Flo said, “but then his brother’s wife called and he left and forgot about it. We can’t always be responsible for someone else’s foolish decisions, can we?”
“I suppose not,” I said, not sure that philosophy applied in this case.
As we got up to leave, the wail of sirens could be heard in the distance.
“Always something,” Flo said, “especially with so many tourists.”
“Could I use your bathroom before we go?” I asked.
“Of course,” Flo said. “You all should. You won’t find a lavatory on a floatplane.”
“We’d better call Trooper McQuesten and Detective Flowers,” I said, pulling my cell phone from my handbag.
“You go ahead to the john,” Bill said. “What’s his number?”
I handed him the phone and recited the number for Ketchikan’s police headquarters. He started to dial as I left the room, and even with the door to the small bathroom closed, I heard him say, “Trooper McQuesten, this is Bill Henderson. I’m with Jessica Fletcher and Kathy Copeland. I think we know where Kathy’s sister, Wilimena, went. It’s a place called Walker Cove in Misty Fjords. We’re flying there with—what’s his name, Mrs. Fitzgibbons?” Flo answered. “Borosky. Bob Borosky. Right—Walker Cove—we’re leaving for Mr. Borosky’s place now—what’s that?—fine. Thank you, sir.”
Kathy took my place in the bathroom.
“What did McQuesten say?” I asked Bill as he handed me back my phone.
“He and the detective are tied up with a homicide that just happened. I guess that’s what those sirens were all about. He said that if they can’t get to us before we leave, he’d dispatch a police plane to Walker Cove and meet us there.”
Flo wished us the best of luck as we left her home and headed for Bob Borosky’s house. When we arrived, he’d put on a beat-up tan leather jacket over his T-shirt and donned a Seattle Mariners baseball cap. “I figured I’d see you again,” he growled as we approached where he stood next to his floatplane.
“We appreciate you agreeing to take us, Mr. Borosky,” I said.
“Long as you’ve got the money,” he said. “And hell, let’s not be so formal. Name’s Bobby.”
“All right, Bobby,” I said. Between the three of us we had just enough cash and traveler’s checks to pay Mr. Borosky’s eight-hundred-dollar fee.
“Let’s go,” he said.
I looked back along the road we’d taken to his house, hoping to see an approaching police car. There wasn’t one.
“I’d like to wait until Trooper McQuesten arrives,” I announced.
“He said he didn’t think he’d make it in time,” Bill Henderson said. “Remember?”
“Still—”
“If you folks want to go to Walker Cove,” Borosky said, “we’d better get to it. There’s a front comin’ through later this afternoon, and I don’t intend to get caught in it. We go now or we don’t go.”
Bill started for the plane, which was secured to the dock with ropes. He turned and said, “Come on. You heard the man.”
“We’d better,” Kathy said, her voice lacking conviction.
“I suppose so,” I said. “But I’d feel better if the police were with us.”
Because the plane was parked against the side of the dock, you could enter only from the left side, the pilot’s side.
“Why don’t you sit up front with him?” Kathy suggested. She said to Borosky: “She’s a pilot.”
“Is that so?” Borosky said, laughing. “Looks like I can sit back and let you do the flyin’. ”
“I hardly think so,” I said.
Borosky opened the door for me on the left-hand side and told me to get in. I could see that it wouldn’t be easy. It meant scrambling over his seat and wedging myself into the one on the right-hand side of the plane.
Thank goodness I’d decided to wear slacks and not a skirt that morning.
Once I was settled, Borosky pulled his seat back forward to allow Kathy and Bill to climb into seats behind me. A bench to the rear of them provided additional space for passengers, although in our case it wasn’t needed. Borosky squeezed his large frame into the seat next to me. “Get those seat belts on,” he said. “If you get a little queasy and think you’re going to toss your cookies, there’s bags in the pockets behind the seats. Don’t bother looking for parachutes. There ain’t any.”
The control panel and dual yokes looked primitive to me compared to the fairly new Cessna that I’d been flying back in Cabot Cove. In fact, the whole aircraft looked like something from another age.
“How old is this plane?” I asked, trying to sound simply interested and not concerned.
“Damn near sixty years,” Borosky said as he went through a preflight ritual that he’d undoubtedly performed thousands of times. “Came off the assembly line up in Canada in 1950. Cost damn near fifty thousand bucks back then. If I wanted to sell it today—and I’m not saying that I do—it could fetch almost five hundred thousand. At least that’s what they tell me.”
We were all duly impressed.
“Everybody ready?” Borosky yelled over the roar of the engine, which he had coaxed to life.
We confirmed that we were. He had disconnected the ropes holding the plane against the dock before coming on board. Now, with his door open, he pushed away with his foot and we drifted out into the open water of the canal. He slammed his door shut, increased the rpm, and guided us into the middle of the channel. A small boat with a lone fisherman saw us coming and quickly moved out of the way.
We reached Tongass Narrows. Borosky pointed the DeHavilland Beaver into the wind, advanced the throttle to achieve maximum power, and we started our bumpy trip across the Narrows’ chop. It seemed an eternity, but then I suddenly felt the aircraft becoming lighter as its pontoons began to plane on the water. Borosky pulled back on the yoke, and we were airborne.
Ending up on the sixty-year-old plane had happened so fast that there hadn’t been time to think.
Once we had learned where Wilimena had gone, a sense of irrational elation had set in. Now my mind began to process what was happening. I’d wanted a ride on a floatplane, but was convinced that there wouldn’t be time. But here I was, sitting in the right-hand seat next to a grisly, but not entirely unpleasant, veteran pilot. Of course, I was as excited as Bill and Kathy about the possibility of finally finding Wilimena Copeland. After all, that had been the purpose of the trip.
But more somber thoughts replaced the excitement as we left the Ketchikan shoreline and headed into that magical place known as Misty Fjords. What would we actually find once we arrived? It had been weeks since Willie’s disappearance. Was it possible that she’d spent those weeks in a remote cabin? Had she actually found the gold? If she had been in that cabin for two weeks, how had she survived? My mind raced. Why had she told her pilot, Hal Fitzgibbons, that she would be returning by boat? What boat? Had she made some prearrangement to be picke
d up by someone else? The encounter we’d had with Mrs. Fitzgibbons suggest that her husband was a man Willie could have trusted. What had caused Wilimena, who had been so open with everyone about her reason for coming to Alaska, to suddenly develop a severe case of paranoia?
Had Wilimena’s disappearance been covered in the local Ketchikan newspaper? If so, why hadn’t it prompted the Fitzgibbonses to report her missing? Being called to his ailing brother’s bedside would explain Hal’s lack of action, and it was entirely possible that Flo Fitzgibbons didn’t read the local paper. But surely there had been talk in town of a missing woman. The police would have questioned at least a few Ketchikan citizens.
I forced these thoughts from my mind. They represented the past. What was important was that we deal with the present and find out once and for all what had happened to Kathy’s sister.
Civilization was behind us now as we banked left and went up what Borosky said was the Behm Canal. There was a set of headphones for everyone on the plane. Once we had them on, we could hear his comments above the steady growl of the old Beaver’s Pratt and Whitney 450-horsepower radial engine. His pride in his aircraft was heartening. He said he could fly as far as 700 miles without refueling, and that he could get up to a cruising speed of more than 150 miles per hour. It wasn’t an easy aircraft to fly. He was constantly busy adjusting the trim to take the pressure off the control yoke and repeatedly working the fuel mixture lever to keep the engine humming at peak performance withoutwasting fuel. He took special pains to point out to me various features of the cockpit, including the fact that because so much of his flying was done in extremely cold weather, the oil reservoir filling spout was located in the cockpit itself, where warm oil could be added to the engine. Despite all the uncertainty about what we would find once we reached Walker Cove, I had to admit that I was enjoying this impromptu flying lesson.
“Everyone all right back there?” I asked, turning to Kathy and Bill.
Kathy nodded, although the expression on her face said something else. She was leaning into Bill, which reminded me that aside from finding Willie, there was a budding romance to consider. That brought a smile to my lips. Would there be a wedding back in Cabot Cove? It was entirely possible. My hope was that Kathy’s sister would be there to celebrate with her.
The farther we progressed into Misty Fjords, the more desolate and rugged the terrain became. Low clouds had settled over the area, and sheer granite cliffs, their tops obscured, seemed to hurtle down from the heavens, hemming us in. Majestic waterfalls poured down the face of the cliffs, nature’s force a thing of beauty yet also ominous.
“I don’t like those clouds,” I said.
“I’ve seen a lot worse,” said Borosky. “It’ll get bad later tonight. There won’t be much flyin’ tomorrow, I can tell you that.”
We flew over New Eddystone Rock, which rose more than two hundred feet above the water, the last vestige of a once active volcano. Borosky pointed out that it was named by an explorer of the region, Captain George Vancouver, after a lighthouse on Eddystone Rock in the English Channel. His occasional commentary was interesting, although sightseeing wasn’t high on our list of priorities.
The closer we got to Walker Cove, the narrower the Behm Canal became. The sheer walls on either side seemed to be closing in on us. They were higher than the plane, creating the impression that we were flying inside a box. Winds swept down off the canyon walls, buffeting the aircraft, each jolt a reminder that being up in the air wasn’t a natural act for man.
Borosky banked the plane hard right.
“Walker Cove,” he announced.
If it had seemed that we were closeted by encroaching walls while flying up Behm Canal, that sensation was now magnified. The granite cliffs seemed only a few feet from the Beaver’s wingtips, and I worried that a sudden strong gust of wind could slam us up against them. Borosky seemed calm and confident, although he now worked even harder to control the plane.
“Do many people come here?” I yelled.
His reply came through my headset: “Not many. Every once in a while I bring a fishing party here, but there’s lots better places to fish, that’s for sure.”
“Is there a camp of some sort?” I asked, again having to raise my voice over the Pratt and Whitney’s masculine roar.
“Nope. There’s a cabin at the end of the cove, back in the woods. Built by the state, but I don’t know anybody who uses it. Used to be a little dock, just pieces of wood nailed together and floating on empty oil cans. Don’t even know if it’s still there.”
I had noticed since entering Walker Cove that Borosky had begun losing altitude, deliberately, of course, and we were now only a few hundred feet above the slate gray water.
“Over there,” Borosky announced, pointing ahead to the shoreline on the right, where towering evergreens came down to the water’s edge.
“What’s there?” I asked.
“Where that dock and cabin used to be.”
He banked right; being so close to the water gave the impression that the right wingtip might dip into it. He leveled off and cut power. Now, through mist and wisps of fog, I saw what he’d pointed to. A tiny dock bobbed in the water. Behind it was what appeared to be an overgrown path leading into the woods.
“That’s it?” I asked.
“That’s it.”
He cut power completely, and we settled down onto the water. He maneuvered the plane until his side was within a few feet of the dock, opened his door, stepped out onto one of the floats, grabbed a strut, and waited for the natural momentum of the plane to nuzzle it up against the dock. He hopped onto the dock and continued to hold the Beaver’s strut to keep it from drifting away.
“Toss me that rope,” he ordered. “It’s on the floor under your seat.”
I did as instructed, and he used it to secure the plane to the dock.
“Come on, come on,” he said. “I got you here. Get out and do what you have to do.”
I reversed the difficult task of exiting the plane, followed by Kathy and Bill.
“There’s nothing here,” Kathy said. “It’s so desolate.”
“You say there’s a cabin in the woods?” I asked Borosky.
“Used to be.”
“Let’s go,” I said, taking steps toward the path.
“Maybe we shouldn’t,” Kathy said. “I’m—I’m scared.”
“We’ve come this far,” Bill said. “Nothing to be scared of.”
Borosky remained with his plane as we started up the path. Bill led the way, with Kathy and me only a few steps behind. It was eerily still and quiet as we left the shoreline and were immediately surrounded by the dense forest, the only sound our footsteps on the densely packed trail. It crossed my mind that Alaska wasn’t known as bear country for nothing. I tried to remember what I’d once read about how to thwart a bear attack, but came up blank. Lie down in a fetal position or run? Remain quiet or scream like a banshee? The only advice I could come up with was to avoid going where bears were likely to be found—useless information at this juncture.
We’d gone perhaps three or four hundred feet when Bill stopped. “Look,” he said.
Kathy and I peered beyond him. Fifty feet ahead, a small cabin stood in a clearing that wasn’t much bigger than the cabin itself.
“Oh, my God!” Kathy said. She ran past Bill, reached the cabin, and threw open its door. “Willie!” she shouted.
Bill and I looked at each other. He smiled and nodded in satisfaction. I started for the cabin, got halfway there, and turned to see him still standing where I’d left him.
Murder, She Wrote: Panning For Murder: Panning For Murder (Murder She Wrote) Page 22